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FAI Guide (Fully Automatic Installation)
Chapter 9 Various hints


This chapter has various hints which may not be explained in great detail.


9.1 Advanced tricks

Use mkdivert[22] if a postinst script calls a configuration program, e.g. the postinst script for package apache calls apacheconfig, needs manual input. You can fake the configuration program so the installation can be fully automatic. But don't forget to use rmdivert to remove this faked script.

During the installation you can execute commands inside the newly installed system in a chroot environment by using chroot /tmp/target or just $ROOTCMD followed by the command you want to call for eg. $ROOTCMD dpkg -l show the packages installed to the new system.

The only task, which has to be done manually for new hardware, is to assign the MAC address to a hostname and to an IP address and define classes for this host, if the existing configuration files are not generic enough to deal with this new host.

There's a tradeoff between writing a few large configuration scripts, or many short scripts, one for each class. Large scripts can distinguish classes by using case statements, the ifclass test or with class mechanisms for cfengine scripts.

If your computer can't boot from network card you need not always boot from floppy. Define a partition /fai-boot in your disk_config configuration file. Then the class FAI_BOOTPART will automaticly defined and will create a lilo entry for booting the FAI bootfloppy from this partition. So you can start the reinstallation without a boot floppy. This will also make the test phase shorter, since booting from hard disk is much faster than booting from floppy.

To use the /file/scratch partitions on all Beowulf nodes use the kernel automounter and following configuration.

     nucleus[~]> cat /etc/auto.master
     /scratch /etc/nodes.scratch
     nucleus[~]> cat /etc/nodes.scratch 
     *               -rw,soft,intr           &:/files/scratch


9.2 Useful functions for advanced administrators

adddivert
Add a file to the list of diversions and replace the file with a dummy script. This is useful when a postinst script need manual input. At the end of the installation all diversions are removed.

skiptask
This given list of tasks are skipped. For e.g use in partition.DISKLESS.


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FAI Guide (Fully Automatic Installation)
Version 1.5 for FAI version 2.3.1, 15 apr 2002
Thomas Lange lange@informatik.uni-koeln.de